portrait

There’s something fascinating about monkeys, especially when they’re just lying around like they own the place (which, to be fair, they do). It’s hard not to project our own reading of facial expressions on their faces, wrong as that may be, hence the title here…

The Erhu is a Chinese violin that sounds atrocious to my European ears. But when you find an Erhu player on an overpass in Central and that he lets you take your time shooting a portrait, you can tolerate the sound for a few seconds, open nearly all the way to f/1.4 and get a nice bokeh in the background of your street portrait !

There’s a roleplaying game called Apocalypse World that has a woman with a red gas mask on the cover. Dogan wanted to emulate that and he had a red T-Shirt so he wrapped it around his head. We took a few shots and then I told him to drop the T-Shirt and do a shot bare-chested. This one is my favourite.

When I shot this series I was worried that everyone would look the same (since the faces are not exactly visible). So it becomes about other things: accessories, postures, post-processing, etc. In the end a fair number of the 29 photos are interesting in their own right.

In July I usually take part in a friendly game meet-up. There’s about 30 of us there, sharing a house and playing role-playing games for a few days. I usually do portraits and this year someone had brought a gas mask, so I decided that would be the theme for the portrait session. Julien wanted to wear his hoodie over the gas mask and I thought he looked like a dead ringer for the more violent protestors who had been walking the streets of France only a few weeks before, hence the title of the shot. The whole series was shot outdoors with no gear apart from the camera itself.

It’s often said that you can see a man’s soul in his eyes. Well, that’s certainly true of Ian McDonald, guitarist and vocals for the extraordinary funk/soul band Monophonics. This was shot in very bad conditions, the only redeeming feature being that I was literally in the band’s face. Don’t know if they liked it much, but I sure did!

The second ethnic minority in the Longsheng area, after the Zhuang, is the Yao minority. The Yao women have a complex and intricate relationship to their hair. They only cut their hair three times in their lives: when they turn 18, when they are wedded and when they are 36. The keep the braids they cut and integrate then into their daily bun. How much hair is apparent also says something about marital status and the number of children. When we met this Yao grandmother, she agreed to show us how she does her hair, and it was quite fascinating.